Sunday, January 17, 2010

Twenty five days ago our Ethno-App hit the iTunes store. And since that day we have sold around 300. We continue to sell between 10 to 15 a day to mostly the US, UK and Australia.

You only have to look at the support site and the iTunes store reviews to see that expectations were/are very high and users very demanding. In some ways it has been back to the drawing board and re-thinking how we thought researchers would use the App. I have already had a few emails complaining that users are observing communities and not households. Or that they want to input tags and not themes. Well, fine! We're on it. Below I am listing the just some of the enhancements in the first of three updates:

1 Saving clips to Camera Roll from within the App will now be possible

2 From within the App to select an existing clip from within Camera Roll to attach to an event

3 Location of event pin pointed on map

4 Scrollable description box - at the moment long descriptions are unreadable

5 Only show 'Quick Start' once a project has been created to avoid confusion.

6 Allow configurable headings - 'Themes' and 'Households' become unhelpful when adding tags observing a community

7 Allow followers, etc. to be selected from contacts from within the App.

It is worth mentioning that we have pushed the button on a web based project management dashboard for outputs from the App.

A consumer version of the App is being worked on for video diary and short/long term panel studies.

Blackberry versions of the professional and consumer App are in progress.

I have so much more to share which I can't yet. Perhaps next week and once I have returned from a key meeting in one of the Southern US states.

1 comment:

Sweet progress! More newness to come. I think its great that the innovations continue. Clearly the iphone and future smart phones that mimick/model it will be favorable to your ethnographic app dev efforts. These devices are really the future (as lame as that sounds and i hate saying it) for ethnographers.

The more i think about it, if i could get a bigger battery, swappable batteries, and a bigger screen- hello tablet, who knows what else you could dev here.

One thing for sure, theres more to gain for researchers to use smarter devices than the tried and true camcorder/camera- those devices dont help the data entry process flow faster and thats where we jacked these days as budgets fall and timelines get crunched. We need to observe/process faster and faster.

I think what initially snagged me on everyday lives was the specific methodology that I would have to adopt or more so sell to my team as the tools guy here at Lextant. In the past I've found that very difficult, always competing with the pen and paper or the dreaded all powerful indesgin or the camera or camcorder that just does one thing right. Building a tool for researchers in my experience it has to devoid of methodologies, it has to be simply super multipurpose though the real accelerators you gain are in specializing- thats the catch really. Keep cranking, and im sure in time everday lives methodology will sink into others peoples processes. You've just scratched the surface of whats possible, keep innovating!

About this site

My name is Siamack Salari and I am a partner at www.ethosapp.com. I am also the President of the Mobile Marketing Research Association (http://www.mmra-global.org/).
This is a sister site to my Linked in Group which is also called, Ethnosnacker (www.linkedin.com/e/gis/129888). I created, ethnosnacker to stimulate much needed debate about what commercial ethnographic research is, isn't and should be.
I also use this site to share my day-to-day experience of managing a mobile ethnographic research platform (www.ethosapp.com).
I want this blog to serve as a single 'place' for all of us who have any interest at all in adding meaning to observations of every day life to 'meet', share and exchange ideas, knowledge and news.
Feel free to contact me at siamack(at)ethosapp(dot)com with articles, comments, suggestions and ideas to make this resource as useful as possible.
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